I stopped reading the news a few months ago. Or was it years ago? Since turning off the ticker and ignoring any flashing red lights, I’ve lost track of time. In doing so, I’ve come to appreciate the inner-workings of the inner working world, noticing precisely what makes people tick. Unlike intricately designed Swiss clocks, what makes people tick are not the finely tuned mechanisms in place to keep accurate time. But rather, something far different and much less prone to rust.
People gravitate towards less consistent measurements, ones that aren’t as easily repaired with cruise and tiny instruments airmailed from your friend in Bern. Anger, rage, and resentment are powerful fuels. Much more readily available than love, joy, and enthusiasm. With everyone still at home, it’s harder to separate the wheat from the chaff. Or as I like to say, the gruntled from the disgruntled.
In an office, you can always spy a disgruntled employee, practically living in the copy room, hunched over, searching for menial tasks to do. Anything that will keep them away from their desk and on a semi-permanent road trip, wandering the halls, away from supervisors and HR. The disgruntled are the mutterers, the sighers, the people who always have a pile of oft-squeezed stress balls nearing the point of explosion.
Turning someone disgruntled into a member of the gruntled class is no easy mission. Gruntled people, while rarer, stand out even more. They are the ones who sing show tunes into the staplers, willingly share personal details, and choose to socialize with colleagues after work, or even after they’ve left the company for good. The trouble with the gruntled, is that in our heavily medicated society, many of the telltales are used to diagnose underlying mental illnesses. Who even uses a stapler these days, let along belts out a few bars from Annie into one?
No comments:
Post a Comment